[Democracy Now and The Nation have purposefully chosen to omit critical facts about Jerome Hauer and BioPort in Jeremy Scahill’s coverage of the ongoing controversy surrounding the Bush Administration and its public health policies – especially as they relate to the stockpiling of vaccines.

These publications made a conscious choice to portray Jerome Hauer as a martyr targeted by the Bush administration while ignoring the fact that Hauer now sits on the Board of one of the most controversial pharmaceutical corporations on the planet, BioPort. This company produces an anthrax vaccine that has a proven track record of being deadly and injurious. BioPort is linked to the Bin Laden Family and may be owned in part by The Carlyle Group.

December 15, 2005 1500 PST (FTW): When FTW published TOTAL HEALTH TYRANNY on November 2, 2005, one of the story’s bullet points read, “Jerome Hauer leaves HHS: where, oh where will he turn up?” Hauer was named as a “person of interest” pertaining to the crimes of 9/11 by Michael Ruppert in Crossing the Rubicon.

On November 3, 2005, a Google-news search pulled up a POGO blog entry that stated the following:

Jerome Hauer, the former head of HHS's [Health and Human Services] biodefense program, is now on the Board of Emergent Biosolutions, Bioport's parent company. [emphasis added]1

Bioport is an extremely controversial pharmaceutical company that manufactures a despicable anthrax vaccine linked to deaths and injuries in the U.S. military. After years of litigation, the vaccine can no longer be administered to soldiers on a mandatory basis. Recent legislation – referred to as Bioshield 2 or BARDA – is attempting to grant complete liability bail-outs to specific pharmaceuticals labeled “countermeasures.” BioPort is positioning itself to gain immunity from litigation if its anthrax vaccine is massively deployed for emergency mandatory vaccination of civilians.

That November 3 POGO post links to this post from October 13:

Especially critical of Simonson [the current head of the Department of Health and Human Services’ biodefense program]has been Jerome M. Hauer, who previously held Simonson's position and is now a consultant for several biodefense firms(Hauer is yet another administration official who has passed through the revolving door. Hauer now sits on the board of directors of Emergent Biosolutions, the parent company of Bioport, the primary manufacturer of the Defense Department's anthrax vaccine. Bioport did not get the primary Bioshield anthrax vaccine contract for the Strategic National Stockpile, instead an upstart competitor, VaxGen, won. Bioport has been critical of Bioshield and of VaxGen.) [emphasis added]2

This is extremely significant. Hauer is critical of Secretary Simonson for not filling the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) with millions of vaccines in short order. Hauer then leaves HHS to take a very clear stance in support of BioPort’s discredited anthrax vaccine, in apparent opposition to VaxGen’s “next generation” anthrax vaccine.

VaxGen has recently announced delays in the production of their anthrax vaccine. They will deliver 75 million doses to the U.S. Government’s SNS later than expected – by the fourth quarter of 2006. Right when this is announced Hauer jumps to VaxGen’s competitor BioPort. Hauer is supporting a vaccine that is certain to cause injury and even death if deployed to tens of millions of people.

The controversial nature of BioPort’s anthrax vaccine was surely a key factor in their loss of a $280 million government contract to VaxGen. The safety and efficacy of the VaxGen vaccine is not yet publicly known.

According to Insight Magazine, the CEO of BioPort, Fuad El-Hibri, is friends with the Bin Laden family.3 The Carlyle Group has never disclosed whether or not they own a stake in BioPort.4 Both before and after 9/11, the Bin Laden family owned a stake in Carlyle.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Shafiq bin Laden – Osama bin Laden’s brother – was meeting with George Herbert Walker Bush in Washington D.C.’s Ritz Carlton Hotel on official Carlyle business.5

If Jerome Hauer ultimately becomes a member of BARDA, we can now see whose interests he will ultimately represent.

DEMOCRACY NOW, THE NATION, AND JEREMY SCAHILL
On November 9, 2005, The Nation published an article by Jeremy Scahill titled “Germ Boys and Yes Men.” The report is very strange in what it says and what it doesn’t.
Scahill shows that Dick Cheney’s office – especially his former chief of staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby, whose nickname is “germ boy” – was obsessed with preemptively vaccinating the entire country for smallpox. When Hauer was at HHS he opposed this, stating that a focus on smallpox alone was causing officials to lose sight of the totality of threats.

But on November 10, when Scahill was interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now (a show he co-produces), he said a deal was reached between Cheney’s office and Hauer where the smallpox vaccine would be offered to half a million soldiers and 50,000 first responders. So there was no safety and efficacy dispute between Hauer and Cheney’s office; the only area of contention was about the number of people who were to be inoculated for smallpox.

What is astonishingly, and inexplicably, left out of Scahill’s report is that Jerome Hauer is now on the Board of Directors of BioPort and that their anthrax vaccine is deadly and injurious. But the following exchange between he and Amy Goodman shows it is damn near impossible that Scahill is unaware of these facts:

AMY GOODMAN: And very quickly, who has been the beneficiary, the corporation, of dealing right now?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, Amy, that perhaps is something that doctors who have been working on this can address directly, because it's interesting how -- there's one company called Bioport, which manufactured anthrax vaccine,that literally made a killing off of these vaccines. And there are a number of companies that have profited directly. But this is -- the political story here is about Scooter Libby coming up against a guy who is truly a public health professional, the Vice President's office coming up against a guy who was truly a public health professional, and then apparently targeting him because he had dared to stand up against them. [emphasis added]

Here Scahill reveals to us that he is aware of the BioPort anthrax vaccine and its track record of death and injury. But rather than explain what “literally made a killing off of these vaccines” specifically means to the large listening and viewing audience tuned into Democracy Now on November 10, 2005, he glosses right over it as if it was somehow unimportant. Anyone who is not familiar with the history of BioPort’s despicable anthrax vaccine would have no clue what Scahill was referring to.
So why does he skirt this issue in both his report and the interview?

JEREMY SCAHILL: -- the political story here is about Scooter Libby coming up against a guy who is truly a public health professional [Jerome Hauer], the Vice President's office coming up against a guy who was truly a public health professional, and then apparently targeting him because he had dared to stand up against them. [emphasis added]

It’s politics.

As is par for the course on both the left and the right, the truth dies in politics. Medical investigator Liam Scheff pointed out to this reporter that Democracy Now has a political agenda against Bush and Cheney, and if Jerome Hauer (a Democrat) can be used to further that agenda, then so be it.

Unfortunately it is actually Scahill and Democracy Now who are being used. It would be nice to say The Nationis being used as well, but their track record does not allow FTW to be so kind [see Crossing the Rubicon, chapter 17]. BioPort is never mentioned in The Nation report – not once.

…more than 80 percent of the nearly $1 billion allocated under the program has gone to a scandal-plagued company that has never successfully produced an FDA-licensed vaccine. In November 2004 California-based VaxGen was handed one of the largest government vaccine contracts in history. The company is largely known for its failed AIDS vaccine, and just a few months before VaxGen won the Bioshield contract, the Nasdaq took the unusual step of delisting it from trading because of financial irregularities. So why did it get the contract? "I have no idea why VaxGen was selected," admits Henderson, who remains chair of the influential Secretary's Advisory Council at HHS. "It's not for me to decide whether it's a good idea or not." But it was for Simonson and his staff. And as with many Bush Administration contracts, several signs point to cronyism as the deciding factor--among them: VaxGen CEO Lance Gordon is a longtime associate of one of Simonson's top deputies on Bioshield, Dr. Phil Russell, former chief of Army medical research.

All of this information is basically correct, but Scahill exposing the dirty laundry of VaxGen yet not their competitor. Why? The fact that BioPort is never mentioned properly throughout Scahill’s report or in the Democracy Now interview, while Jerome Hauer is repeatedly praised, effectively makes this a great piece of PR for BioPort.

In absolutely no way does FTW support BioPort or VaxGen. We recognize that the BioPort vaccine has a proven track record of injury and death that must never be overlooked for any reason. It should also be noted that we reported on VaxGen’s sordid past back in March of 2004.6

Scahill continually references the fact that the Bush administration was lying about Iraq having the capability to attack the U.S. with weaponized smallpox, yet he leaves out the fact that immediately after 9/11 Jerome Hauerwas making the exact same claims, helping to propel Bush’s call to war [see Crossing the Rubicon, page 426, referencing Newsday, September 22, 2001, article by Laurie Garret].
Scahill details widely circulating claims that Stewart Simonson, who recently took over Hauer’s position as head of the biodefense department at HHS, is “the next Michael Brown.” Formerly a lawyer for Amtrak, Simonson has no experience in public health whatsoever. Judith Miller is mentioned in Scahill’s report for her close relationship with Cheney’s office. She participated in a bio-terror drill titled “Dark Winter,” which simulated a smallpox attack on American soil. Cheney and Libby took special interest in this exercise, and Libby was interviewed by Miller in her epic book, “Germs,” where she reported his view of weaponized smallpox at length. Those are some of the points Scahill makes in the proper context.

WHO IS JEROME HAUER?
Jerome Hauer is a Bio-Warfare expert who is well known in New York City for having created former mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) in World Trade Center 7 – the building that inexplicably imploded in a freefall on September 11, 2001, without having been hit by an airplane. Hauer’s corporate affiliations include SAIC, Batelle, CSC-DynCorp, Hollis-Eden, and one of the nation’s most powerful private investigative and security firms Kroll Inc., among others. Now BioPort has been added to his resume.

On the eve of 9/11, in NYC, Hauer was having drinks with his close friend, the recently retired FBI Agent and “Osama-Chaser,” John O’Neil. At that time O’Neil was the head of security at the World Trade Center complex, a position Hauer had helped him to get. O’Neil died in the World Trade Center on 9/11, and it was Hauer who identified his body.

Hauer was quoted by Newsday staff writer Laurie Garrett on her personal blog as saying, “John O’Neill was head of the FBI’s counterterrorism branch in Washington. He led every important investigation you can name — the USS Cole, Tanzania, Kenya bombings. He retired three weeks ago. I helped him get the job as head of security for the World Trade Center.And the irony is, the guy he chased for most of his career killed him.”